I guess the game isn't particularly well-suited to the XBox. I never thought it made a lot of sense on that platform, as IMHO the game lives on the ever-flowing torrent of expansions and plug-ins created by the community. The user interface is much better suited to a mouse+keyboard combo as well.
That doesn't excuse the buggy XBox gameplay, of course, but it may help to understand if Bethsoft didn't put as much energy into it as into the PC version.
I'm not familiar with the mozilla development process, but surely submitting a patch isn't a guarantee that it will end up in the Mozilla "distro". Someone will have to audit the submission, and accept or reject it based on certain policies.
So while "Open Source" means that everyone can fix the bug in their personal version of a software, it doesn't mean that just anyone can fix a bug in general.
To illustrate my point, look at how MNG support was removed from Mozilla, despite many people arguing against it.
Um, the alphabet is the really, really easy part. I've been learning japanese for about a year now. Learning the phonetic alphabets (hiragana and katakana, about ~100 characters together) was easily done within two weeks.
However, it's the grammar that is continuing to boggle my mind. It's so very different, and makes the construction and understanding of even simple sentences a serious challenge.
It takes years to wrap your mind around a language that has different concepts than the one you grew up with.
I wouldn't worry about the CPU temperature. My old XP 1800+ ran at ~60 degrees all the time, and higher on hot summer days. And it did so stably and without any complaint. (The airflow in that case sucked.)
I don't know how such temperatures will affect the overall lifetime, but I'd guess that even if it should fail prematurely someday, it will still be far enough in the future for you to want an upgrade anyway.
Going off topic a bit, this fact has boggled my mind quite a bit. How can Titan have such a dense atmosphere? After all, it is gravitational forces which hold the atmosphere together, and Titan doesn't even have twice the mass of (Earth's) Moon.
To put it in relation some more: it has about 21% the mass of Mars, and 2% the mass of Earth! So how the heck does it manage to keep its atmosphere?
That's good to know. I have a Shuttle XPC myself, but was afraid to go with a 9800 - I just wasn't sure if that tiny PSU would be able to shoulder it, and installed a 9600XT instead.
Now, since the X800 consumes a bit less than the 9800 I know I can safely upgrade when the time comes. Thanks!
Of course it sucks when you have to watch ads just after having had to pay a good deal of cash for the right to watch a movie. But I don't think the cinemas would survive without the ads - since most of the ticket price goes directly to the distributor.
Here at least (germany), the cinemas live on the ads, popcorn and cola - not on the movies. It's a neccessary evil, and completely unrelated to the copyright issue.
I think the "filter" part you mention is the key of the trick. As I understand it, monitors (and apparently LCD projectors) compose the color of each pixel by varying the intensities of three distinct, fixed-wavelength lights.
I haven't tested this, but I think if you were to prismatically split the light your computer monitor (or beamer) emits, you'd see it's composed of three narrow parts of the spectrum.
Hence, if a surface is made to reflect only these three parts of the light spectrum and absorb everything else, the picture you project on it is unaltered, while no reflected ambient light is added to it (as it happens on normal projection screens).
Now there might be a problem if different projectors use different wavelengths to compose their pictures. If projector A uses a different red than projector B, and the screen is "tailored" to projector B (which of course happens to be of Sony manufacture), then projector A loses a colour channel and the picture looks like something out of an acid trip.
Although, I can tell you nativly speak Spanish. The reason... You said "Colon" and not "Columbus".
Ah, thanks for mentioning this... and here I was wondering wether he referred to a grammatical instrument or a rather displeasing part of the human anatomy!
You're speaking from a power user / developer perspective - I wasn't talking workstations, I was talking desktops. 95% of all users, and that includes gamers, are not power users who could sensibly utilize a dual processor system. For these kinds of users it's mostly cosmetic, when you want a fluid desktop experience under high processor load.
So I guess while dual processor x86 and Mac systems are price-/value-competitive (as you say, with the Mac maybe even cheaper, which I do not object to) that's irrelevant for the mass market. Single-processor machines rule the mass (read: desktop) market (mostly because they are "good enough"). However, Apple could change that if they overpriced their "low-end" G4 PowerMacs just a bit less.
I didn't know OS X shipped with an IDE. That's interesting and shows that Apple has more respect towards their customers than Microsoft, i.e. they assume that users might actually want to program their computer. While going a bit offtopic, I think it's a shame that Windows doesn't natively bring any programming tools. Anyway, thanks for bringing this up - I'll educate myself about it.
Okay, I should have included the WinXP Pro license (~150 EUR) which I already had (yeah, legally) and the assembly cost (which I did myself, but time's not free) - let's say 50 bucks. What "nickel and dime extras" you are referring to I do not know. The system was built on a Shuttle barebone system, so once I added the neccessary components I was ready to go.
What I was trying to say is that AMD's fastest home desktop system is still a few hundred bucks cheaper than Apple's minimally-equipped aging G4. The iMac isn't cheaper either. (Admitted, the eMac is, but who wants that one...) That doesn't seem right, and not particularly smart on Apple's side either.
If they'd trim the G4 PowerMac to silence and thermic efficiency, then sell it for about 700-900 EUR (which cannot be impossible), I bet they'd have quite a market.
Of course, if you can afford and actually use 5 top-of-the-line systems, Apple's prices might not appear that steep to you.:-)
Could you supply links to that? Google doesn't turn up anything on "Lunokhod 9". Lunokhod 1, however, seems to be an interesting device: designed for 90 days of operation (seems familiar?), lasted 11 months (let's see how well the NASA rovers fare).
To the best of my knowledge, there are no dual Athlon64 machines - you'd need an Opteron for that, and they come with their own hefty pricetag.
But Apple is a wee bit too expensive, right. The smallest (dual) G4 Powermac for ~1400 EUR? Ouch! My (single )Athlon64 box is faster, has four times the RAM, twice the disk space, and a better graphics card. It is smaller and probably more silent. And it cost considerably less (~1050 EUR).
No, Apple, as much as I'd like to get one of your computers (I really like the design of the G4 Powermacs, and the OS), I'll not do so at this pricetag.
Well, all of these things can also serve (in theory, at least) to protect an individual or a small business against a greedy corporation trying to rip them off.
What's needed is a way to prevent the abuse of these legal mechanisms.
OLED panels don't just suddenly "die" (unless an electronics defect occurs). They'll probably get gradually darker, and the color balance will start to be off. You'll have plenty of warning before having to buy a "refill".
I like the idea, but you may be right about the price thing.
Socket s = new Socket(ADDR, PORT); if (s==null) { //show error message... }
Okay, I don't know Java. What's wrong with this piece of code? It may not be pretty, and it may be that one can safely assume that creating/opening a socket will always work.
But if, for some odd reason, it doesn't work, then at least the user knows what went wrong.
It wouldn't surprise me if for some of the SNES games, there isn't exactly what we would call a "sourcecode" - some might be written entirely in assembly.
After all, back in the day, men were still Real Men, programmers were Real Programmers and games ran on the bare metal.:)
Slashdot Mirror
"run"? More like crawl, probably. Even without the stencil buffer shadows...
I guess the game isn't particularly well-suited to the XBox. I never thought it made a lot of sense on that platform, as IMHO the game lives on the ever-flowing torrent of expansions and plug-ins created by the community. The user interface is much better suited to a mouse+keyboard combo as well.
:-)
That doesn't excuse the buggy XBox gameplay, of course, but it may help to understand if Bethsoft didn't put as much energy into it as into the PC version.
Morale: just get the PC version next time.
I'm not familiar with the mozilla development process, but surely submitting a patch isn't a guarantee that it will end up in the Mozilla "distro". Someone will have to audit the submission, and accept or reject it based on certain policies.
So while "Open Source" means that everyone can fix the bug in their personal version of a software, it doesn't mean that just anyone can fix a bug in general.
To illustrate my point, look at how MNG support was removed from Mozilla, despite many people arguing against it.
I hope you'll never have to suffer a war. But if you were to do so, I'm sure the tone of your posts would change drastically.
Frankly, your cold attitude to mass killing is sickening.
Um, the alphabet is the really, really easy part. I've been learning japanese for about a year now. Learning the phonetic alphabets (hiragana and katakana, about ~100 characters together) was easily done within two weeks.
However, it's the grammar that is continuing to boggle my mind. It's so very different, and makes the construction and understanding of even simple sentences a serious challenge.
It takes years to wrap your mind around a language that has different concepts than the one you grew up with.
Oooh, gmail. Wouldn't mind one of those! :-) If you'd be so kind, mail to: blackhole AT apoapsis DOT net. Thanks!
For a second I thought you meant that he's to marry Aragorn... ghastly image in my mind, go away!
I certainly wouldn't mind being ballast on ther X-Prize flights...
I wouldn't worry about the CPU temperature. My old XP 1800+ ran at ~60 degrees all the time, and higher on hot summer days. And it did so stably and without any complaint. (The airflow in that case sucked.)
I don't know how such temperatures will affect the overall lifetime, but I'd guess that even if it should fail prematurely someday, it will still be far enough in the future for you to want an upgrade anyway.
Going off topic a bit, this fact has boggled my mind quite a bit. How can Titan have such a dense atmosphere? After all, it is gravitational forces which hold the atmosphere together, and Titan doesn't even have twice the mass of (Earth's) Moon.
To put it in relation some more: it has about 21% the mass of Mars, and 2% the mass of Earth! So how the heck does it manage to keep its atmosphere?
Since it's open source, it shouldn't be that hard to add a simple recording feature if you wish to do so.
That's good to know. I have a Shuttle XPC myself, but was afraid to go with a 9800 - I just wasn't sure if that tiny PSU would be able to shoulder it, and installed a 9600XT instead.
Now, since the X800 consumes a bit less than the 9800 I know I can safely upgrade when the time comes. Thanks!
That sounds like a bowl of well-stirred buzzwords. God, I'm so tired of these... but it is a nice hammer. :-)
Of course it sucks when you have to watch ads just after having had to pay a good deal of cash for the right to watch a movie. But I don't think the cinemas would survive without the ads - since most of the ticket price goes directly to the distributor.
Here at least (germany), the cinemas live on the ads, popcorn and cola - not on the movies. It's a neccessary evil, and completely unrelated to the copyright issue.
Two tethers would also make it much easier to get entangled. I wouldn't want two long strings drift around me in a zero-g environment.
Besides, how would a tether break, unless hit by a micro-meteorite?
I think the "filter" part you mention is the key of the trick. As I understand it, monitors (and apparently LCD projectors) compose the color of each pixel by varying the intensities of three distinct, fixed-wavelength lights.
I haven't tested this, but I think if you were to prismatically split the light your computer monitor (or beamer) emits, you'd see it's composed of three narrow parts of the spectrum.
Hence, if a surface is made to reflect only these three parts of the light spectrum and absorb everything else, the picture you project on it is unaltered, while no reflected ambient light is added to it (as it happens on normal projection screens).
Now there might be a problem if different projectors use different wavelengths to compose their pictures. If projector A uses a different red than projector B, and the screen is "tailored" to projector B (which of course happens to be of Sony manufacture), then projector A loses a colour channel and the picture looks like something out of an acid trip.
You're speaking from a power user / developer perspective - I wasn't talking workstations, I was talking desktops. 95% of all users, and that includes gamers, are not power users who could sensibly utilize a dual processor system. For these kinds of users it's mostly cosmetic, when you want a fluid desktop experience under high processor load.
So I guess while dual processor x86 and Mac systems are price-/value-competitive (as you say, with the Mac maybe even cheaper, which I do not object to) that's irrelevant for the mass market. Single-processor machines rule the mass (read: desktop) market (mostly because they are "good enough"). However, Apple could change that if they overpriced their "low-end" G4 PowerMacs just a bit less.
I didn't know OS X shipped with an IDE. That's interesting and shows that Apple has more respect towards their customers than Microsoft, i.e. they assume that users might actually want to program their computer. While going a bit offtopic, I think it's a shame that Windows doesn't natively bring any programming tools. Anyway, thanks for bringing this up - I'll educate myself about it.
Okay, I should have included the WinXP Pro license (~150 EUR) which I already had (yeah, legally) and the assembly cost (which I did myself, but time's not free) - let's say 50 bucks. What "nickel and dime extras" you are referring to I do not know. The system was built on a Shuttle barebone system, so once I added the neccessary components I was ready to go.
:-)
What I was trying to say is that AMD's fastest home desktop system is still a few hundred bucks cheaper than Apple's minimally-equipped aging G4. The iMac isn't cheaper either. (Admitted, the eMac is, but who wants that one...) That doesn't seem right, and not particularly smart on Apple's side either.
If they'd trim the G4 PowerMac to silence and thermic efficiency, then sell it for about 700-900 EUR (which cannot be impossible), I bet they'd have quite a market.
Of course, if you can afford and actually use 5 top-of-the-line systems, Apple's prices might not appear that steep to you.
Could you supply links to that? Google doesn't turn up anything on "Lunokhod 9". Lunokhod 1, however, seems to be an interesting device: designed for 90 days of operation (seems familiar?), lasted 11 months (let's see how well the NASA rovers fare).
Rover specs
To the best of my knowledge, there are no dual Athlon64 machines - you'd need an Opteron for that, and they come with their own hefty pricetag.
But Apple is a wee bit too expensive, right. The smallest (dual) G4 Powermac for ~1400 EUR? Ouch! My (single )Athlon64 box is faster, has four times the RAM, twice the disk space, and a better graphics card. It is smaller and probably more silent. And it cost considerably less (~1050 EUR).
No, Apple, as much as I'd like to get one of your computers (I really like the design of the G4 Powermacs, and the OS), I'll not do so at this pricetag.
Well, all of these things can also serve (in theory, at least) to protect an individual or a small business against a greedy corporation trying to rip them off.
What's needed is a way to prevent the abuse of these legal mechanisms.
OLED panels don't just suddenly "die" (unless an electronics defect occurs). They'll probably get gradually darker, and the color balance will start to be off.
You'll have plenty of warning before having to buy a "refill".
I like the idea, but you may be right about the price thing.
Okay, I don't know Java. What's wrong with this piece of code? It may not be pretty, and it may be that one can safely assume that creating/opening a socket will always work.
But if, for some odd reason, it doesn't work, then at least the user knows what went wrong.
It wouldn't surprise me if for some of the SNES games, there isn't exactly what we would call a "sourcecode" - some might be written entirely in assembly.
:)
After all, back in the day, men were still Real Men, programmers were Real Programmers and games ran on the bare metal.